Current Affairs

June 16, 2018

<<<One day a novice writer and college dropout submits a short story to a hip literary magazine named for a pair of then notorious avenues on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Although he lives far away on the Upper West Side, the aspiring writer is intimately familiar with the neighborhood because it’s where he has been buying the heroin he is addicted to for the last five or six years. During this time he has been supporting himself and his habit by working in the kitchens of a string of popular New York City restaurants. His story marries the two poles of his existence in the tale of a young chef trying to score heroin on the Loisaida who is turned away by his dealer because his arms are free of track marks.

Publishing the story leads to a successful book about the seamier side of restaurant kitchens, which in turn leads to an even more popular TV series. No longer obliged to work as a chef, and having successfully kicked heroin, the man begins an altogether different kind of life. As he later describes his new vocation, in the profane language that does much to distinguish him from more genteel purveyors of food culture: “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit and basically do whatever the fuck I want.”

After several seasons, a noticeable change comes over his TV show. Where once every episode was largely filled with scenes of him eating, drinking (he makes no secret of his love of alcohol) and chatting about food (more often than not purchased from street vendors), now more screen time is given over to the lives, often harsh, of the inhabitants of the far-flung places he visits, which include war zones such as Lebanon, Gaza, Libya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. What distinguishes him from conventional journalists is not only his exuberant cursing but also how he foregrounds his physical body: his voracious but discriminating palette, his long-suffering liver, his tattoo-covered forearms, and so on. The experiences he subjects himself to become his guarantee of authenticity; they make him into a kind of performance artist.

The place he loves more than anywhere else in the world is Vietnam, a country he first became intrigued by when reading Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American. Appropriately, it’s in Hanoi that he achieves what is perhaps his greatest moment: persuading the then-president of the United States who happens to be in Vietnam on a state visit to join him for a bowl of bun cha and some cold beer in a humble noodle shop. A simple meal shared with the most powerful person in the world encapsulates his message: that our common humanity is most readily found in the everyday act of eating, and in the infinite particularities of local cuisines.

Fully aware of his long sequence of good luck, he tells a reporter: “I have the best job in the world. If I’m unhappy, it’s a failure of imagination.” His last Instagram post, made just days before he hangs himself in a hotel room in Alsace where he is filming a new episode, is a close-up of a choucroute garnie, featuring a thick slice of ham atop of mound of sauerkraut, flanked by sausages, boiled potato and two very thick chunks of salted pork. A two-word caption expresses his perpetual defiance of all moderation, and his endless gusto for the good stuff that awaits: “Light lunch.”>>>

"The Best Job in the World" was posted on June 15, 2018byRaphael Rubinstein. See also the new show Raphael has curated, which includes Archie Rand's painting "Sisters" (1983):

March 31, 2018

The emergence of a previously unknown and uncharacteristically fiery essay by Lionel Trilling is all the buzz in intellectual circles. Our stringers at far-flung camupuses report the excitement at faculty clubs and academic production centers where Trilling's essays in criticism, particularly those written between 1940 and his death in 1975, command a respect accorded to few contemporaries, not because he had a penchant for oracular pronouncements (he did not) but because of the nuanced style of exposition in his writing, which reflected a mind of immense subtlety, irony, and complexity. By indirections he found directions out.

The reputation for what champions admired as subtlety (and detractors considerd coyness) may change with the posthumous appearance of an essay Trilling was said to have begun in 1967 but never completed to his satisfaction. The essay's working title was "I Hate the Liberals." Victor Mathis, the archivist who discovered the draft in Trilling's papers, insisted that marginal handwritten comments in the legendary Columbia prof's distinctive script imply "that this jest was a place-holder for an ultimate title along the lines of 'The Liberal Dilemma in an Age of Economic Decline'."

That Trilling, author of "The Liberal Imagination," had commenced on an essay critical of New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and of what was vulgarly known as "limousine liberalism," a phrase Trilling dissects, made news wherever talking heads shmooze. "It's like an intellectual version of Tom Wolfe's outing of Leonard Bernstein's black panther party as 'radical chic'," said Jenna Clauss of the Brookings Institute. Marvin Murdeck of the McLuhan School of Publc Information emphasized that the title, though evidently a joke Trilling enjoyed, was "deliberately reductive of his thoughts on the whole question of political hypocrisy among union-smashing NIMBY elites who are incredibly full of shit but should not be cariacatured nevertheless."

Handmade signs declaring "I Hate the Liberals" have sprung up in affluent parts of Ann Arbor, Madison, Colorado Springs, Ithaca, Providence, Rhode Island, and Evanston, Illinois. Some say this is happening in the spirit of a joke. "It's post-modernism, man," said Josh Lucas, a freshperson at Northwestern, who has not yet declared a major but is leaning toward sociology. But there are those who see in the outpouring of anti-liberal sentiment the hyperbolic release of impulses long repressed. Professor Leon Elson, the Hayte-Jacques Professor of Applied Kenesiology at Florida Ache, compares the "I Hate the Liberals" fad with people screaming out the windows, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." Elson's point: "It's not so much a matter of art following life, or life following art, but life following life, and art, art, depending on how you define it."

February 04, 2018

I signed up to write an introduction to Lafcadio Hearn's collection of ghost stories, to be published by Princeton University Press next year. Hearn lived in New Orleans for a few years in the late 19th century and was a beloved local. His Louisiana novel, "Chita" is still in print. I used his wonderful travelogue "Two Years in the West Indies" when I visited Martinique. The city of St. Pierre, featured in the book, was no more, blown up by a volcano, but his other landmarks and vivid people lived on. I thought I knew plenty about Lafcadio Hearn when I took on the job. As it turns out, I knew little. There are over a hundred collections of books by Lafcadio Hearn: essays, stories, novels, travelogues, philosophical dialogues with Shinto and Zen monks, and, the strangest thing of all, there is a whole other Lafcadio Hearn, named Koizumi Yakumo, who is revered in Japan. There have been movies, operas, Noh plays, and hundreds of illustrated editions of his Japanese writings. He collected folk stories, interviewed monks, taught English literature in Tokyo, took Japanese citizenship and hated the West and the Meiji era that corrupted, as he saw it, the Japan that knew no shadows in painting before it opened to the West. He had four children in Japan, two of whom wrote books about their father. In the U.S. there are dozens of memoirs and correspondence published after his death. He died young, at the age of 54. At the end of the nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn was one of America's best known writers, one of a stellar company that included Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Twain, Poe and Stevenson have entered the literary canon and are still read for duty and pleasure. Lafcadio Hearn has been forgotten, with the remarkable exceptions of Louisiana and Japan. Yet, Hearn’s place in American literature is significant for many reasons, not least of which is how the twentieth century came to view the nineteenth. This view, both academic and popular, reflects the triumph of a certain futuristic modernism over the mysteries of religion, folklore, and what was once called "folk wisdom." Lafcadio Hearn was a Greek-born, Irish-raised, New World immigrant who metamorphosed from a celebrated fin-de-siècle American writer into the beloved Japanese cultural icon Koizumi Yakumo in less than a decade, in roughly the same time that Japan changed from a millennia-old feudal society into a great industrial power. In other words, in the blink of an eye, or, as in one of his stories, the time it takes to burn an owl's feathers so that the nocturnal beautiful-girl-shape of the true creature might emerge. Hearn changed from one person into another, from a Greek islander into a British student, from a penniless London street ragamuffinin into a respected American newspaper writer, from a journalist into a novelist and, most astonishingly, from a stateless Western man into a loyal Japanese citizen. Yet, this life, as recorded both by himself and others, grows more mysterious the more one reads about it. It is like the Japanese story of the Buddhist monk Kwashin Koji, in “Impressions of Japan.” This monk who owned a painting so detailed it flowed with life. A samurai chieftain saw it and wanted to buy it, but the monk wouldn't sell it. So, the chieftain had him followed and murdered. But when the painting was brought to the chieftan and unrolled, there was was nothing on it; it was blank. A monk told Hearn this story to illustrate an aspect of the Buddhist doctrine of karma, but he might as well been speaking to Hearn about his own personae: the more “literary” Hearn becomes, via his prodigious output and the memories of his intimates, the more mysterious he becomes, until he vanishes like the painting. Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 not far from Ithaca, on the island of Lefkada in Greece, from the union of Charles Bush Hearn, an Irish surgeon in the British army, and Rosa Kassimatis, a beautiful woman born in Cythera, Aphrodite's island, about which Baudelaire wrote (in Richard Howard's memorable translation): "On Aphrodite's island all I found/ was a a token gallows wherein my image hung..." Hearn saw in Cythera the fatal beauty that would haunt his entire life. The island of Lefkada, said by Ovid in his “Ode to Love” to be the place where Sappho jumped to her death in the sea because of unrequited love, was Lafcadio's paradise, the womb-island from which he was expelled when his father returned and took mother and child to Dublin. While his father was abroad on another military assignment in the West Indies, Lafcadio's mother Rosa fled Dublin with a Greek man, back to her "island of feasting hearts and secret joys," leaving Lafcadio in the custody of a pious Catholic aunt. Then a schoolyard accident in one of the British schools he resentfully attended left him blind in one eye. His father remarried, and his aunt's family became bankrupt, two unrelated yet near-simultaneous disasters. A seventeen-year-old Lafcadio wandered penniless in London among vagabonds, thieves, and prostitutes. In the spring of 1869, a relation of his father's, worried about the family's reputation, handed him a one-way boat ticket to Cincinnati, Ohio, where another relation of the Hearns lived. In Cincinnati his relation handed him $5 and told him to get lost. A twenty-year-old Lafcadio found himself, once again, a penniless tramp. So far, with the exception of a few school exercises and some ghoulish poetry inspired by his fear of ghosts, Lafcadio Hearn had written nothing. In Cincinnati, he lived in the underworld, until the printer Henry Watkin allowed the young tramp to sleep on piles of old newspapers in his shop. Watkin, a utopian anarchist, encouraged him to read radical and fantastic literature. It was the age of socialism, anarchism, imperialism, untaxed wealth, unredeemable poverty, spiritism, snake-oil, newspapers, electricity, photography, telegraphy, telepathy, railroads, high art, and kitsch. A bounty of exotic objects and customs flowed in from the cultures of vanquished Native American tribes and recently freed African slaves. The astonished masses of immigrant Europeans, who were mostly peasants and religiously persecuted marginals, brought with them rich stories of folklore, customs, and beliefs. Hearn, like many new Americans, felt rightly that he was living in a time of wonder and possibility. His education took a vast leap: he underwent a kind of osmosis as if he had absorbed the spirit of nineteenth-century America from the newspapers he slept on.Clumsily, with Henry Watkin's encouragement, he started to write. And so the moral of this story is: you need to have a miserable childhood to have an interesting life, and fuck you, Trump, with your immigrant phobias. Let's all become Japanese.

November 20, 2017

Ed note: For the past two weeks we've featured posts by Kristina Marie Darling, associate editor-in-chief of Tupelo Press. She's been sharing profiles of poets who are included in the forthcoming Native Voices a new anthology exploring and celebrating contemporary Indigenous poetry. The Press has launched a kickstarter campaign to help bring the anthology to print. Here's more information about how you can support this important book. sdl:

November 15, 2017

Dean Rader publishes widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and visual/popular culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His recent collection, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, (Omnidawn Chapbook Series 2014) was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the Best Books of Poetry of the year. In 2016, he won the Common Good Books Prize (judged by Garrison Keillor) and in 2015 was the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award (judged by Stephen Burt). He has also written scholarly books, including Engaged Resistance: Contemporary American Indian Art, Literature, and Filmfrom Alcatraz to the NMAI (University of Texas Press, 2011), which won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Scholarship and Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry(University of Arizona Press, 2001, edited with Janice Gould). He is a professor at the University of San Francisco. For more information, visit his website.

An Indigenous daughter of the West, CMarie Fuhrman was born in Southwest Colorado and has lived in various rural towns of states all along the Rocky Mountains. She has earned degrees in Exercise Physiology, English and American Indian Studies and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho where she co-teaches Native Literature and Ethnic Studies classes and is associate poetry editor for Fugue. Cindy’s poetry has been featured in Broadsided Press’s NoDapl compilation, two anthologies, and several literary journals including Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art. She is recipient of the Burns Award for poetry and multiple fellowships. Her current project, The Problem of My Body, focuses on the forced sterilization of Native women. CMarie divides her time between Moscow and McCall, Idaho.

In anticipation of Tupelo Press's forthcoming Native Voices anthology, I'm pleased to introduce a conversation with our co-editors about what the book makes possible in the classroom.

KMD: You are all both accomplished educators, with positions at such colleges as the University of San Francisco, University of Idaho, and many others. I’d love to hear more about your experiences teaching poetry. What’s missing from contemporary writing programs and the conversations that take place within them?

DR: I think there are two answers to your question. One answer involves what gets taught to undergraduates in terms of Indigenous poetry. This includes classes to both English majors and--in some ways more importantly--to non-English majors. For example, at USF we have a very popular class called “Native American Literature and Film” which fulfills the university’s literature core requirement. It is designed for non-English majors and will be, for most students in the class, the only literature class they take in college. Increasingly, there are courses like this all over the country. And they are popular. Professors who teach these classes are often overworked and perhaps even under-prepared--especially for poetry. This anthology will help them teach contemporary Indigenous poetry in an inclusive way that highlights not just the thematics of poetic creation but its forms as well.

I also think more and more students are pursuing graduate studies in Native literatures. We definitely need more students--ideally more Indigenous students--getting PhDs in literature, English, AIS, and American studies. What has been missing for these students is a current anthology of Indigenous poetics that arms them to to graduate level work in Native poetries.

The second issue is about poets themselves and what gets taught in graduate creative writing programs. I think recent books by Natalie Diaz and Layli Long Soldier might get taught in MFA programs, but there is a vast canon of Indigenous American poetry that does not get taught in graduate programs because graduate writing courses tend to focus on craft, and for years readers have been taught to read books by Native writers through the lens of theme or context or culture. This anthology helps correct that.

CF: I agree with everything that Dean said. As a teacher of Native Lit and advisor for our Universities IKEEP (Indigenous Knowledge for Effective Education Program) I am responsible for teaching Natives and non-Natives about Indigenous literature. I often teach classes for Native students only, but I have taught mixed classes as well. What I have found in teaching both is that Natives would have to learn about Indigenous writing from a non-Native perspective and non-Natives were never given the chance to hear about craft or the impetus for a poem or story from the Native writer. Often I would invite, via Skype or classroom visit, the writers and poets to talk to the students themselves, but this is not always feasible. It is my hope that a collection like this one might be able to bring those voices into the classroom directly. This way, both student and teacher may gain a better perspective and understanding of Native writing.

KMD: In what ways is pedagogy politically charged? Can our decisions as teachers create a more inclusive and just artistic community?

DR: A great part of teaching is related to 1) knowledge and 2) comfort. Most poets and professors who teach did not, themselves, read poetry by Native writers in college or graduate school. So, they are less likely to teach it now. I think many professors shy away from teaching, say, Wendy Rose poems or Simon Ortiz poems or LeAnne Howe poems because they don’t know much about tribal histories or even larger Native histories. Furthermore, Native issues are not forefront in American culture right now the way African American and Chicano/a issues are. So, the political urgency of Black Lives Matter or the immigration debate may, for some, feel exigent. I would argue though American minority issues, the marginalization of people of color, and the absence of Natives from popular and political culture, and the larger issues of class make teaching works by Native writers paramount at this moment in history.

KMD: What new directions do you hope that this anthology opens up within our thinking about poetry, literary tradition, and aesthetics more generally?

DR: I hope this anthology encourages writers and professors to think about Indigeous poetry in terms of craft. I really hope our book shifts the lens a little bit so that people do not turn to Native poetry just to “learn about Indians” (as I heard someone say not long ago) but to learn about art. What if readers start thinking about Native poetry the way they think about Native painting and pottery--as modes of aesthetic production, as vibrant acts of creation.

CF: I can’t say this any better.

KMD: Tell us about one particular contribution from the anthology that you would be excited to teach. How would you utilize this particular work in the classroom?

CF: I am excited to teach work by Nimiipuu poet Michael Wasson. First, because he is from the Nez Perce tribe which is located here in Idaho, not far from the University. Many of our students are Nez Perce and I think they would be honored and inspired to hear from one of their own. Not to mention, Michael’s work is outstanding. His poems are complex, multi-layered, and extremely poignant. I am excited to bring poets into the classroom that reflect my students.

KMD: Given the anthology’s unique structure, what does this book make possible within the context of writing programs? For writing communities more generally?

DR: The book’s combination of poetry and craft are going to be unique. I also like the idea that our book foregrounds influential poetic texts. This highlights the ways in which poetry is a kind of collaboration, or at the very least a conversation. It also helps illustrate direct influences and echoes.

CF: Generations and a sense of community are very important to Native people. This book is way of honoring our teacher, our elders, and inspiring our children to write their truths as well.

Because this book is comprised of writing from poets all over the US (including Alaska and Hawaii) it gives a more complete picture of the Native American experience, particularly the contemporary experience while honoring the past. Though this book is not meant to be a historical work, it does help to fill the gaps in both the current events and the overlooked history of Native people in the U.S.

For more information about our anthology, our mission, and how you can bring this book to life, please visit our Kickstarter page.

November 10, 2017

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to continue a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

With that in mind, I'm thrilled to introduce another one of our talented contributors, Michael Wasson. Michael is the author of This American Ghost (YesYes Books, 2017). His poems appear in American Poets, Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, Best New Poets, and Bettering American Poetry. He is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. I'm pleased to present his poem, "Mourning Ceremony." Enjoy!

When grief is allowed to us it’s in the stern shape and voice of a man who walks around ‘n yells at us and his hollering holds our faces while we are handed polaroid photographs and old portraits and lip-stained cups with either coffee or red Kool-Aid rings inside and dirty paintings and ashy ashtrays and almost clean enough pots and iron skillets and washed pans and jean jackets still glazed with the scent of sweat ‘n armpits and pine-rubbed flannel coats and pants so dirty when you glide your hand across ‘em dust slips off and fades into the blaring gymnasium lights and cracked and bent glasses frames with a little resin of ear oil and a smear of dried blood still in the screws and plain moccasins and porcupine quill roaches ranging from child-size to adult-size worn out shoes and torn boots and a wristwatch an elderly woman puts to her ear and keeps it there like a phone and a phone though we don’t have enough money to buy an answering machine to record your lost breathing soft into some spooled static and a collection of tapes and your Black Sabbath and Beatles and Jimi Hendrix and the Eagles and Led Zeppelin and Credence Clearwater Revival and the blankets you took with you when you ended up homeless for a little while and slept along the Clearwater River and baskets with nothing inside them and door knobs and rugs and your dirty shirt that had Mickey Mouse adorned in a headdress and more blankets and letters and notes and he’s yelling at us that this is the only time we get to mourn for you for this loss and for this collection of your life that we broadcast across this throbbing I feel up here in these wooden bleachers and across the sudden loneliness taking ahold of our burning throats that you need to hear us and that you are never coming back that we are weak people who are holding your separated body in our wrecked arms ‘n hands and on our laps ‘n behind our eyes and we grip onto these monstrous pieces of you until we break into this ancient song now flooding the air and shaking the overhead lights burying you beneath this rush of desperate longing and face your bright and drawn-out vanishing of ‘ilcwéew’cixnim tim’íneyour sáw’is kaa sayaqi’sníx kiké’t núunim ‘ipsúusx pipísne pawic’asc’asnóoya and sound our tightening ribs so wide even all the long dead ones can hear each of our gym-lit bodies bursting and wailing and blooming open.

Grateful acknowledgments to As/Us, where this poem first appeared.

For more information about our mission, and how you can help, please visit our Kickstarter page.

November 09, 2017

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to continue a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

With that in mind, it is an honor and a delight to introduce one of our poets, Karenne Wood. Karenne Wood is an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation who directs Virginia Indian Programs at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. She holds a MFA in poetry and a PhD in linguistic anthropology. She has worked at the National Museum of the American Indian as a researcher and at the Association on American Indian Affairs as a repatriation specialist. In 2015 she was honored as one of Virginia’s Women in History. Karenne is the author of two poetry collections, Markings on Earth (2000) and Weaving the Boundary, (2016). Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Kenyon Review, Orion, and Shenandoah.

Here is one of her contributions to the anthology project, "Deer Woman." Enjoy!

Deer Woman

He hunted me into the clouds as I sought the bluestar-petaled flower, its scent like magnolia and peach.I left my family in the meadow to pick my stepsAcross patched snow, where fields grasped edges of sky.

There is within some of us a longing to be stripped clean.

Alongside, the forest held his shape. His scent rose to mewith the wind. Too late I knew him, too late to find cover,and I ran as I was made to—haunches taut, nostrils steaming,like a swallow I darted into glistening whiteness.

When I tired, he was there. His circle tightened.Dark, and dark-eyed, hypnotic—I could feel his hungeras my own. I had taunted his dreams more than once,dreamt that mouth, the merciless craving in him.

There is within some of us a longing to be stripped clean,

To give it all—strings of sinew, tufted hair, marrow,white ropes of fat, to bare the body’s pulse. I froze,heavy with the need to dissolve into him, his mouththe deep red song of an appeasable desire.

On the wind, I hear another song, my family calling outto me, calling me into my name. But I cannot returnfrom this altitude, bound to his hunger, which is a kindof love. I will kneel in a cloud’s wisp of grace, to discover

how completely our own wanting wounds us.

Published in Weaving the Boundary, University of Arizona Press. Grateful acknowledgements as well to Shenandoah, where this poem first appeared.

For more information about our anthology project, and how you can help bring this book to life, please visit our Kickstarter page.

November 08, 2017

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to announce a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

With that in mind, it is an honor and a delight to introduce one of our poets, Ishmael Hope, with a piece entitled “Canoe Launching into the Gaslit Sea”….

“Canoe Launching into the Gaslit Sea”

Now, as much as ever, and as always, we need to band together, form a lost tribe, scatter as one, burst through rifle barrels guided by the spider’s crosshairs. We need to knit wool sweaters for our brother sleeping under the freeway, hand him our wallets and bathe his feet in holy water. We need to find our lost sister, last seen hitchhiking Highway 16 or panhandling on the streets of Anchorage, couchsurfing with relatives in Victoria, or kicking out her boyfriend after a week of partying in a trailer park in Salem, Oregon.

Now, as much as ever, and as always, we need to register together, lock arms at the front lines, brand ourselves with mutant DNA strands, atomic whirls and serial numbers adding ourselves to the blacklist. We need to speak in code, languages the enemy can’t break, slingshot garlic cloves and tortilla crumbs, wear armor of lily pads and sandstone carved into the stately faces of bears and the faraway look of whitetail deer. We need to run uphill with rickshaws, play frisbee with trash lids, hold up portraits of soldiers who never made it home, organize a peace-in on the walls of the Grand Canyon. We need to stage earnest satirical plays, hold debate contests with farm animals at midnight, fall asleep on hammocks hanging from busy traffic lights.

Now, as much as ever, and as always, we need to prank call our senators, take selfies with the authorities at fundraisers we weren’t invited to, kneel in prayer at burial grounds crumbling under dynamite. We need to rub salve on the belly of our hearts, meditate on fault lines as the earth quakes, dance in robes with fringe that spits medicine, make love on the eve of the disaster.

For more information about our mission, and how you can help, please check back for information about our fundraiser, which will be available in the coming days.

August 21, 2017

August 21, 2017The Grand EclipseI have it in my calendarThe next time it comes aroundI’ll be dead, or at least I hope soBut no Totality here In San FranciscoOnly the Path of PartialityAnd I’m not at all impartialWhen total or even partial darknessBlots out fearOr does it erupt with fear?Will there be mobs screaming in the streetsNazis on the looseLike some old movie?Teenagers running out of the movie houseAhead of The Blob?In fact I plan on watching that movieOr digging into a bookWhile everyone else slips on their glassesTo take a lookAt the Cosmic ClockTicking to a stopI have no need to witnessThe Solar System as it makes its roundsI have seen it circle in my HeartI have felt it revolve around my SoulAs Suns and Moons orbitMarking all of TimeShould I forfeit Eternal Life?Or should I savor Partial Life?I’ll look inwardWhen the Sun gets to blotOr I’ll watch the flowers in my yardAs they tilt upwardsTowards the Dark

-- Hilton Obenzinger.

Note that Gertrude Stein liked sitting with her back to a beautiful landscape. -- DL

August 01, 2017

AWP began over 20 years ago to help professionalize the MFA as a terminal degree so that writers working in academia would be eligible for tenure. The logic was that teachers with the MFA could go back to their institutions and be as eligible for a tenured position in writing and literature as any PhD. As we all know, it hasn't worked out that way. What none of us – AWP included – anticipated was the slide of academia into business model it now embraces, which undermines tenure and relies heavily on poorly paid contingent (part- and full-time) faculty. There is a dearth of positions and an abundance of writers seeking positions. In other words, to quote Abraham Lincoln when asked about being besieged by eager office seekers, "there's too many pigs for the tits" – and in fact that mama pig has vanished into thin air. More accurately, she has been slaughtered by administrators, CEOs, and an industry that views students as customers rather than the product – and therefore its faculty not as colleagues in a larger mission, but as worker bees. Other than a handful of prestigious chairs or professorships for big-name writers, tenure-track positions for poets teaching in the land of Composition and Intro to Literature where most of us reside are so scarce as to be virtually non-existent. We need to rethink the purpose of the MFA if we want it to survive – and if we want to make a living.

How many poets do you know who hold tenured or tenure-track teaching positions? There are some – and God bless them, too. (Believe me, I'm not envious – I just marvel that they were able to do it.) Now, how many poets do you know who are existing on the verge of poverty while doing the Adjunct Shuffle over several schools, counting coupons and praying they will have a job next semester? I bet it's a lot more. I'll even bet it's you.

It's easy to understand the attractiveness of the teaching life. I taught for almost 20 years, and for most of the time, I loved it. For one thing, it's deeply important work. If you are lucky, now and again you get one of those students who you know is going to change the world – and you get to be justly proud you might have had a hand in that. You get to talk about the thing you love most – words and language – with colleagues who understand its importance. There are lots of exciting things going on around you – student productions, guest speakers, art installations, gatherings. You get to be self-directed (it's your classroom) and you get chunks of time off between semesters. And, most wondrous of all, you have unfettered access to that bastion of civilization: the academic library. The goodies that still exist are indeed good.

Only…you don't get paid remotely enough. In fact, you get paid wages so low that colleges have become the intellectual sweatshops of the Western world, particularly in the humanities. Academia is frequently cited by unions and labor advocates as one of the worst offenders in abuse of the gig economy. Contingent faculty have no job security. Your classes are often over-enrolled; you likely don't get benefits; you are expected to have office hours even if you don't have any office space; you probably don't get a vote in faculty meetings (in fact, you may not even be on the email list for faculty meetings). The institution indicates how little you matter by paying you less per hour than a barista at Starbucks and by subtly and not-so-subtly letting you know that, should you jump ship, there are plenty more where you came from. As for your writing, it only exists for the institution insofar as it can bring in publicity, prestige and more students. Poetry thrives on campuses in spite of the institution, not because of it. The sad reality is, despite its lip service to the lofty goals of higher education, academia today treats teachers like a 1910s shirtwaist factory boss treated his sewing machine girls.

We need to ask ourselves how academia has sustained this teaching model for so long. It's simple: By dangling the carrot of "maybe" – maybe next year, maybe when so-and-so retires, maybe we'll take it up with the Board, maybe, maybe, maybe. We want it so badly to be real that we willingly subject ourselves to a predatory and exploitative working environment in the hope that tomorrow things will be better.

Poets (and other writers), we need to stop this. Remember that old cliché about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome? Yeah, that. This is of course not to say everyone should instantly stop teaching. But understand what's going on. It's time to stop waiting for the invisible pig to reappear. Like Godot, she's not coming.

But…but…how? What else is a poetry degree good for? Lots of things, bunky. The MFA can be leveraged in many ways – editing, publishing, marketing, content writing, and so on. Despite received wisdom, humanities degrees show employers that applicants have a broad range of knowledge and critical thinking skills. Or you don't have to leverage it all. Go work in a field you like that doesn't care about your MFA. Go be a doctor, a lawyer, an insurance salesman, a baker, a candlestick maker, an office manager, a dentist, an engineer, an HVAC installer, a farm hand, a fighter pilot, a web designer, or a barista at Starbucks, where not only will you be better paid, you'll get free coffee. Look, all jobs are annoying at some level. That's why it's called work. Be creative. The one thing poets are is creative.

But if I don’t teach, how will I have time to write? Well, get off Facebook, for starters. Another thing to think of is how much time and intellectual energy is spent grading papers, planning classes, meeting with students, and worrying if you're going to be able to pay the electric bill. Teaching's "time off" lure is largely illusion, especially if you are scrambling to pay bills over the summer break. Lucille Clifton wrote her first books as a stay-at-home mom while raising six stair-step babies. Wallace Stevens sold insurance. William Carlos Williams was a doctor, and Rafael Campo is one right now. Dana Gioa worked in advertising, and Bob Hicok owned his own auto die design business. Poets writing now run non-profits, practice as psychologists, and build fine furniture. You want to write, you'll figure it out. And it's easier to figure out if the utilities haven't been cut off.

Then why get an expensive MFA at all? Because a good MFA program isn't really about teaching credentials anymore – it's about learning your craft and finding your beloved community. We live in a world which is happy to tell you every day that what you do doesn't matter. The MFA begs to differ. Can you get by as a writer without one? Of course you can. Does getting an MFA enrich your writing life? A good one does. In fact, the MFA program is probably the one place in academia where the mission of good writing and decent pay for faculty still exists. (The irony is that academic institutions love MFA programs, especially low-residency MFA programs, because they bring in significant money with low overhead in the form of student housing and other services, and a lot of publicity and prestige for the school.)

If you want an MFA, you must move beyond thinking that it's going to make one whit of difference to your chances of getting a good teaching job. Because it isn't, any more than it's going to help you move up in line for astronaut training. This isn't AWP's fault or the MFA program's fault. The playing field has been seismically shifted. We have to shift, too, to move into thinking more broadly about what other things the degree can give us. As for me, getting my MFA at Bennington was the most important thing I ever did. When I went there, I felt like I finally got to put my Batman suit on after a lifetime of walking around as Bruce Wayne. It made me part of a history and community of writers. And yes, it was expensive. In fact, it took me eighteen years to pay off my loans. But it took so long because I was making bupkis at teaching. To make ends meet, I taught here, I taught there, I taught everywhere at once (my record was eight writing classes in one semester). Even after years of adjuncting when I finally had a full-time (but still contingent) position, composition was still languishing at the bottom of the salary scale. If I had had a job that paid appropriately, I would have paid my loans off a lot sooner. But I was committed to the idea that my MFA meant I was supposed to be a teacher, no matter what. So for almost twenty years, I scrambled for those breadcrumbs.

It's time to change the paradigm. We as poets (and other writers) will have to change it, because why should academia? Tuition costs have risen astronomically while faculty salaries have stagnated; colleges are raking it in on the backs of its faculty. So as for me, even though I loved teaching, I will not teach in a college composition department again. For one thing, I can't afford it. For another, I refuse to participate any longer in a system that thrives on exploiting most of its workers. In reality, academia as a contemporary institution doesn't care about your art or your teaching. It only cares about the bottom line.

And I leave you with this: the average cost of an MFA in creative writing today is around $30,000. A 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee starts at $30,595. That's stripped, with no bells and whistles – and as soon as you drive it off the lot, its value drops exponentially. You'll also have to trade it in again some day and get a new one. Just sayin'.

Doug Lang, born in Swansea, Wales, came to the US in 1973, and quickly became the most American of poets. In Washington, DC, he has been for many years a human hub of the local community of writers and artists. The reading series he directed at Folio Books helped establish the DC-New York-Bay Area poetry axis that fostered the work of dozens of emerging poets in the ‘70s and ‘80s. His own work, in collections like Hot Shot, Magic Fire Chevrolet, and Dérangé, and in many small-press and zine publications, has influenced American poets and poetry for decades. His erudite command of literature, cinema, music, and visual art, his wit, and his indefatigable spirit of patience and good will have inspired the admiration of writers throughout the US and around the world.

March 31, 2017

Inside sources tell us that Tom Selleck (above left), who plays police commissioner Francis (Frank) Reagan on TV's "Blue Bloods," has established a New York City residence on the down low in order to place his name in nomination for this year's mayoralty race in New York.

Selleck has long nursed political ambitions. The surprise is that the actor, wooed by Republicans, is mulling over the idea of running against Mayor de Blasio in the Democratic primary.

The rumor has excited fans of the veteran actor. "Staten Island needs more respect," said one islander, Stella Carabella, who noted that the Reagans eat their Sunday night dinners in a big house on Staten Island. "It's the most underrated borough," she told New York Post reporter Jackie Lyons.

The Reagan family was said to have discussed the possibility of a mayoral run with yes votes from Danny, Jamie, Erin (played by Bridget Moynihan, pictured right) and Nicky. Grandpa Henry abstained, as did Linda Reagan (Danny's spouse). Jack and Sean, though too young to vote, voiced their support. Vanessa Ray, who plays Eddie Jenko, Jamie's partner, refused to comment though she did call attention to the dubious fundraising tactics of the de Blasio administration. It is conceivable that Eddie and Jamie, who kissed on November 11, 2016, will campaign in tandem for Jamie's dad. Henry Reagan (played by Len Cariou) refused to explain his abstention on the key vote but insisted that, contrary to published reports, the TV Reagans are unrelated to the late Ronald Reagan (above right). The early Ronald Reagan was an FDR Democrat who supported abortion rights during his tenure as governor of California, which means a lot to my wife Stacey.

Erin Reagan moved to New York City at age eighteen and began her modeling career with high-profile appearances in Vogue and Elle. "Erin and I are alike," Bridget Moynihan told David Frost, with the crucial difference that unlike the police commissioner's daughter, who is an assistant district attorney, she (Bridget) dated Patriots' quarterback Tom Brady for three years (with an amicable parting of the ways that was duly reported in People in 2006). Brady is the father of their son, John Edward Thomas Moynihan, who turns ten on August 22 of this year.

Bridget is unrelated to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. She resides in Pacific Palisades and is married to businessman Andrew Frankel.

February 14, 2017

...And, having returned home, Nikolay Ivanovich said this to his wife:“Do not be afraid, Ekaterina Petrovna, and do not worry. Only there isn’t any equilibrium in this life. And the mistake is only off by some kilogram and half for the entire universe, but still, it’s amazing, Ekaterina Petrovna, it is simply remarkable!”

First of all, my apologies for the delay in posting this: I must again excuse myself by repeating that, like so many of us, I've only just returned from DC and the AWP. And so, dear reader, please accept this, my belated Happy St. Valentines's Day wishes to us all: may each of us seek to daily find within ourselves those inner resources that enable us to feel and express our love. Yesterday, I was helped on this occasion, during a particularly difficult personal time and in this unsettling historical moment, by going to see a film with two people I care about very much. While Lion is far from a perfect picture, what else is there in this world that can better evoke in us those cathartic and complex feelings of pity and empathy more than the innocence of a child?

I also wish to say that I had all the relevant selections from the book ready to go before I got on the road, but, to quote E. M. Foster: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" What I want to tell you about today is an experience of censorship I had with the Russian Absurd, Daniil Kharms Facebook page I had started, intended to promote the book with a series of selections, including the poem that follows here. The response I received to it was: "Your ad wasn't approved because it doesn't follow our Advertising Policies for adult products or services. We don’t allow images or videos that show nudity or cleavage, even if it’s portrayed for artistic or educational reasons." While I appealed the decision repeatedly, including finally to a live person, explaining that the post contained neither nudity, nor cleavage, nor certainly any videos, it got me exactly nowhere.

The situation became only more absurd, when Facebook's response to a prose piece in tomorrow's follow up post, "Daniil Kharms on Spirit," that I thought not only innocuous but genuinely elevated and uplifting was: "Your ad wasn't approved because it calls out to specific user attributes (ex: race, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender, disability or medical condition, financial status, membership in a trade union, criminal record, ethnicity, name). Such ads may offend users and lead to high negative sentiment." To make this already far too long introduction shorter: to put it mildly, Kharms, like so many of us today, had a "complicated relationship" with all of mankind, and even with God "himself". I hope you will read on for yourself, and I will only add here the following words from my introduction to the book:

"Humor and horror, Eros and Thanatos, degradation and sadomasochism jostle one another, side-by-side, in these stories and poems. Kafkaesque and Chekhovian situations and motifs from Pushkin and traditional Russian fairy tales are recognizable in Kharms’s sparse prose, yet they appear diseased, stripped down to their bare essentials, as if contorted by the terror of impending arrest and doom." And we might add, "by the terror of love gained and love lost". And now, most of the rest of this, I would like to be in Daniil Kharms's own words.

∞

You can sew. But that’s all bunk.I’m in love with your pudenda;it’s moist and smells abundantly.Another man would peek, let outa squeak, and, sealing his nose, scram.And wiping your fluids from his handswould he return? Oh, what a question;suddenly, there can be no other.Your juices are to me sheer joy.You think my words are an excrescencebut I’m prepared to lick your cuntwithout break for breath and swallowthe delicious squim of your mallowuntil I begin to burp and grunt.

(Daniil Kharms, 1931)

"Joseph Brodsky once quoted Anna Akhmatova, about an improbable Kharms sentence: 'Only with Kharms could that ever work. Never with anyone else.'" (From Ian Frazier's group review of all the books heretofore available in English translation in The New York Review of Books, which includes his own very personal experience discovering, translating, and failing in the attempt to communicate to Anglophone readers how and why Daniil Kharms's works are "funny".)

∞

From “Thoughts about a Girl”

And when she passes by aflutter,As if on air, not a word do you utter;And when with a knowledgeable handShe makes contact— you understand.

And when she lightly, as though dancing,Sliding her lovely foot across the floor,Proceeds to offer her perky breast forYou to kiss— then it is impossible not

To shout out loud and lovingly blowFrom her firm breast a dust mote,And recognize how touching your lipsTo her youthful breast is pointless.

January 21, 1935

In every church bell there is spiteIn every red ribbon there is fireIn every young woman shiveringIn every young man his own steed.

[1936]

March 20, 1938

Came to the window naked. In the house across the street someone must have taken an exception, the sailor’s widow, I think. A policeman came barging in, with the yard sweeper, and someone else in tow. They declared that I have been disturbing the neighbors across the street from me for over three years already. So I have hung some curtains. What is more appealing to the eye, an old woman wearing nothing but a chemise or a young man, buck-naked? And for whom is it less acceptable to show themselves au naturel?

∞

This was my own "working" version of the book's cover. Being a very visual and concrete person, as I was developing and completing the book, being able to see both the "big picture" and the individual pages helped me in doing so. Here, I had "cut" and reversed what I believed to be a double "wedding portrait" of Daniil Yuvachev and Esther Rousakov. Kharms's first wife, she was the daughter of Jewish Russian-French “expats,” and part of the "reverse immigration" that had returned to Russia after the Revolution.

From the Notebooks. July 27. Who could advise me regarding what I should do? Esther brings with her misfortune. I am being destroyed along with her. What must I do, either divorce her or . . . carry my cross? I was given the choice to avoid this, but I remained dissatisfied, and asked to be united with Esther. I was told yet again, do not be married! But despite “having caught a scare,” I still insisted, I still tied my fate with Esther’s, till death do us part. I myself was to blame for this or, rather, I did it to myself. What has happened to the OBERIU? Everything vanished as soon as Esther became a part of me. Since that time, I have ceased to write as I ought to and have only brought misfortune upon myself from all directions. Is it that I can’t be dependent on women, no matter which one it is? Or is the nature of Esther’s character such that she brought an end to my work? I don’t know. If Esther is filled with sorrow, then how can I possibly let her go....

Kharms developed a highly personal and involved symbology, mostly involving an almost kabbalistic play with the letters of her name (his symbol for her as a whole person was the window). Esther Rusakov (née Ioselevich), was repressed, along with her entire family, in 1936.

Before I enter, I will knock on your window. You will see me in the window. Then I will walk through the door and you will see me in the doorway. Then I will walk into your house and you will recognize me. And I will enter you, and no one, except you, will see me and recognize me.

You will see me in the window.

You will see me in the doorway.

[1931]

∞

The woman in the following picture is Alice Poiret, another of "Kharms's women;” both she and his first wife, Esther, have most often been literally cropped out of the few surviving photos of Kharms that have come down to us. Kharms had dedicated a number of poems to Alice, including the following:

Before me hangs a portraitof Alice Ivanovna Poret.She is as gorgeous as a fairy,devious, worse than a snake,she is cunning, my Alice,cunning as Renard the Fox.

Dear Klavdia Vasilyevna,You are a remarkable and genuine person! As much as it grieves me not to be able to see you, I won’t be inviting you to the Children’s Theater or to come to my city. How heartwarming it is to know that there still exists one human being animated by dreams! I don’t know what word one can use to express that force which so delights me in you. I usually call it simply p u r i t y. I have been thinking about how wonderful it is, that which is primal...

… I’m genuinely delighted that you take your walks like so, in the Zoological Garden. Especially if you take walks there not just for the sake of walking, but also to observe the animals— I will fall in love with you even more tenderly.

Daniil Kharms

October 20, 1933

I have studied women for a long time now and can definitively say that I know them with flying colors. First and foremost, a woman likes to be attended to. Let’s say she is standing right in front of you or is about to, and you make it seem as though you’re hearing and seeing nothing, and act like there’s no one else in the room; this inflames female curiosity. And a curious woman is capable of practically anything.The next time I will intentionally stick my hand deep in my pocket with a quizzical appearance, and the woman will plant her eyes on me, like, what’s going on here? And I will slowly draw out of my pocket some sort of spark plug. Well and good; the trap has been sprung, and the fish is in my net!

July 1935

One of the principal sources of divergence of human paths is the matter of preference for either skinny or plump women. I propose we reserve alleys in public gardens for quiet strolling, with two-seat benches distributed two meters away from each other; furthermore, thick bushes should be planted between the benches so that those sitting at one bench are not able to see what is happening at another. On these quiet pathways, the following rules must be enforced:1. Entrance is forbidden to children, both alone and accompanied by a parent.2. All noise and loud conversation are strictly prohibited.3. Only one woman may take a seat next to a man, and only one man next to a woman.4. If the person seated on a bench is resting their hand or some sort of other object on the free seat, you may not join them. Alleys should also be reserved for walking in solitude, with metal armchairs for single people. Between the armchairs, bushes. Entry is forbidden to children; noise and loud conversation are prohibited.— —As a rule, pretty women do not stroll around in gardens.

September 28, 1935

One personage, wringing her hands in sorrow, was saying, “What I need is an interest toward life, and not at all money. I am seeking enhancement, not advancement. I need a husband, and not a rich man but a true talent, the director Meyerhold!”

The Sensual Woodsman

When in the distance flashed sawsAnd the axes had started ringing,My girlfriends all became dearer.I’m in love with them ever since.

Oh, girlfriends, my dear girlfriends,So pleasant to sense you with my hands!You’re all so smooth! All so solid!One more wonderful than the next!

Pronin said, “You have very pretty stockings.”Irina Mazer said, “So you like my stockings?”Pronin said, “Oh, yes. Very much.” And he ran his hand down her leg....

From A Lecture (1940)

Pushkov said:“A woman is the lathe of love.”And he immediately got punched in the face....

From “The Power of...”

Faol continued: “Take, for example, love. It may be for better or for worse. On the one hand, it is written: you must love . . . but on the other hand, it is said: do not spoil . . . Perhaps it is better not to love after all? But it says: you must love. But if you do love, you will spoil. What to do? Perhaps go ahead and love but in some other way? But then why is it that in all languages, the same word is used to designate both this and the other love? So, this one artist loved his mother and this one plump young girl. And he loved them each differently. He handed over to the girl the larger part of his salary. The mother often starved while the girl ate and drank for three people. The artist’s mother slept in the hallway on the floor, and the girl had at her disposal two very adequate rooms. The girl had four coats and the mother just one. And so, the artist took from his mother her one coat and had it altered into a skirt for the girl. So that, in all respects, the artist spoiled the girl but his own mother he didn’t spoil, but loved her with a pure love. However, he did fear his mother’s death, but the death of the girlfriend he feared not, and when his mother died, the artist cried, and when the girlfriend fell out of a window and also died, the artist didn’t cry but found himself another girlfriend. And so it seems that a mother is prized as one of a kind, as though she were a rare stamp that cannot be replaced with another....”

September 29, 1940

You can read the rest of this powerful late "fiction" in the selection of seven prose pieces I had previously published in International Quarterly.

∞

Daniil Kharms’s second wife, Marina Malich's (Durnovo) memoirs were recorded and published by the literary historian Vladimir Glotser in his book Moi Muzh Daniil Kharms (My Husband Daniil Kharms; available only in Russian).

From the Notebooks. May 26 [1938]

Marina stays in bed all day in a foul mood. I love her so very much, but how harrowing it is to be married.I am tormented by my “sex.” For weeks, and sometimes months, I have not known a woman.1. There is one purpose to every human life: immortality.1a. There is one purpose to every human life: achieving immortality.2. One pursues immortality by continuing his bloodline, another by accomplishing great mortal deeds in order to immortalize one’s name. And only the third leads a righteous and holy life in order to achieve immortality as life eternal.3. A man has but two interests: the mundane— food, drink, warmth, women, and rest; and the celestial— immortality.4. All that is earthly is a confirmation of death.5. There is one straight line upon which all that is mortal lies. And only that which is not plotted on this axis may serve as confirmation of eternity.6. And for this reason man seeks a deviation from this earthly road and considers it beautiful or brilliant.

And, last but not least:

From Symphony No. 2

...Well, to hell with him. I will tell you about Anna Ignatievna instead.But to tell you about Anna Ignatievna isn’t so simple. First of all, I know practically nothing about her and, second of all, I just fell off the stool and forgot what I was about to say. Better I tell you about myself.I am tall in height, not stupid, dress colorfully and with taste, don’t drink, don’t patronize the horses, but do like the ladies. And the ladies do not avoid me. In fact, they love it when I accompany them. Seraphima Izmailovna has invited me time and again over to her place, and Zinaida Yakovlevna also told me that she is always happy to see me. And with Marina Petrovna I had this amusing episode, which is the one I want to tell you about. The episode is really quite ordinary, but still very amusing, because Marina Petrovna turned, owing to me, entirely bald, like the palm of your hand. It happened this way: I came over to Marina Petrovna’s and she “boom!” and turned completely bald. That’s it.

February 13, 2017

"I can’t imagine why, but everyone thinks I’m a genius; but if you ask me, I’m no genius. Just yesterday I was telling them: Please hear me! What sort of a genius am I? And they tell me: What a genius! And I tell them: Well, what kind? But they don’t tell me what kind, they only repeat, genius this and genius that. But if you ask me, I’m no genius at all.Wherever I go, immediately, they all start whispering and pointing their fingers at me. What’s going on here?! I say. But they don’tlet me utter a word, and any minute now they will lift me up in the air and carry me off on their shoulders."

[Daniil Kharms, 1934– 36]

∞

Just a little over a year and a half ago, I had the great pleasure to blog in these pages for my first time, on the occasion of having edited the Contemporary Russian Poetry issue of the Atlanta Review (Spring 2015). When I wrote David Lehman, almost exactly a year ago now, to tell him that my first full book, Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings, was forthcoming early this year from Northwestern University Press, I could not have remotely expected his response, an offer to blog about Kharms and my book, today and for the remainder of this week. And so ... here we are, the book's official release is this Friday, February 17, and I am just back in New York City from yet another overwhelming AWP, this time in Washington, DC that is largely unchanged (other than the construction boom in its Midtown and all the newly gentrified neighborhoods) from that summer of 1984 when, as a budding Sovietologist, I walked every day from my GWU dorm room in Foggy Bottom to my internship at the Georgetown Center for Strategic Studies on 17th and K Street. I had every intention then to pursue a career in the diplomatic service and my special interest was arms control, and though the town is little changed, the world and each one of us in it have been utterly transformed in the space of only several months.

1984: what an exciting year that was for all of us, but especially for those with a keen interest in Russian and East European Studies. In May, the USSR had boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics as payback for the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, all of it, the consequence of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. That war, which would become known as "the Soviet Union's Vietnam," was later thought to have been a major factor in the collapse of the USSR. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev would inherit the helm as the General Secretary of the CPSU, after the deaths of three septuagenerian leaders within the space of three years (Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko) and the rest, as they say, is history. It seemed, then that the collapse of the Russian Empire was imminent, and that the shape of things to come, as predicted by George Orwell in his eponymous novel was farther away than it had ever been throughout that bloodiest of all, our 20th Century. Some had even gone so far as to diagnose the idyllic 90s as "The End of History". But then, just as the 21st Century had dawned, 9/11 happened, followed by perhaps our own second Vietnam, the War in Iraq and, at the end of its first decade, a market collapse that threatened to spawn a second Great Depression, and now, "seemingly" all of a sudden, history has come back, full circle and with a vengeance, to bite us all in the ass.

No one could have predicted even a year ago, when I signed on for this task, that this book would be as timely, cogent, and once again relevant as I had believed it would be when I began work on it ten years ago, and I myself only know this for certain now. As I had written in my introduction: “Covering the entire range between the merely unpleasant, the disturbing, and the hilarious, [Daniil Kharms's] protoexistentialist works succeed in bearing, if only tangentially, remarkable witness to the unspoken and unspeakable reality of life under Stalin.... Getting Kharms, I think, requires cultivating a visceral sense of the sociopolitical-cultural context of the repressions and deprivations of the 1920s and 1930s, and the suppression of Kharms and his immediate circle, the OBERIU ... [who] had assumed, in their generation, the “Slap in the Face of Public Taste” mantle of the Russian Futurists, literally adopting Kazimir Malevich’s encouragement to them as their motto— 'Go and stop progress!'” And so, before proceeding, I must begin my week-long residency here by first briefly establishing the links between the so-called Russian Absurdists and their spiritual and aesthetic "fathers" of the preceding generation, the Russian Futurians (so-called because they wished to distinguish themselves from the nationalistic and militaristic Italian Futurists).

In preparation for doing so, as we approached the turn of the year, in the run up to the Trump Inauguration and the book's official release, having assumed that most if not nearly all of us are also members of Facebook, I had started a Russian Absurd on Facebook book page, as well as a Russian Absurd on Twitter page and a Goodreads page,) where for the foreseeable future, I will continue posting selections from and news about the book, as well as links to "all things Kharmsian," some of which I will also be sharing here in the coming week. For now, I invite you to explore the following links and to join/like, follow, and share the group with your interested friends. I very much look forward to this, our journey together, as I prepare, as it where, to "take this show on the road" and to read from, i.e. "perform the book" to various and varied kinds of audiences. In my design of the book, I had made a very conscious effort to represent, within my own space constraints (280 pages,) as many of the different types of materials present in his notebooks as possible (diary entries, letters, one of his NKVD confessions, etc.) My main purpose in doing so was to pay particular attention to Kharms’s development as a writer over the short span of some decade and a half of his creative life. So that the development I am speaking of become self-apparent, I structured the book to follow as much as possible a strictly chronological order. The chapters that emerged, corresponding roughly to the “Early,” “Middle,” and “Late” periods, could also have been provisionally titled “The Theatre of Cruelty,” “The Theatre of the Absurd,” and “Protoexistentialism.” The brief "biographical sections," taken from Kharms’s notebooks, etc., and interspersed at the beginning and end of every section, were intended to cement a more personal relationship with the author, as well as to establish connections between his creative output and the circumstances and events of his life. I hoped that these "section breaks" would also provide “pacing” and some "breathing room" as it were, as well as a sense of a "life lived," so that these mileposts in Kharms’s biography could be used by the interested reader to map these events -- the initial suppression of the OBERIU (late 1920s), the breakup of his first marriage and his exile to Kursk after his first arrest (1931–32), and the growing desperation of his final years (late 1930s) -- over to his writing. Kharms’s poetry, like the prose that precedes it, likewise arranged chronologically, placed at the end, offers a kind of summation.

David Bulyuk, a world-class painter and the self-proclaimed "Father of Russian Futurism," spent the second half of his long life in the Ukrainian community of NYC's East Village and, among a group of painters, including Arshile Gorky, in Long Island's Hampton Bays.

Along with Velimir Khlebnikov, whom Roman Jakobson, the father of Structuralist linguistics, had called "perhaps the most important modern poet," no other poet made such a lasting contribution to Russian and World poetry as Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Aleksei Kruchenykh's best known work is the first Russian Futurist Opera, “Victory Over the Sun” (1913,) for which he collaborated with Kazimir Malevich.

Daniil Kharms (photo gallery) was born on December 29, 1905 and died on February 2, 1942. Today, this one last time, we may celebrate his 111th BIRTHDAY and the 75th anniversary of his DEATH.

As I retell in the introduction to my book, the "Russian Absurdists," the Oberiu (“Obyedenenie Real'nogo Iskusstva” or “Union of Real Art,”) were essentially the second generation of Russian Futurists, and their initial "launching pad," Velimir Khlebnikov and his Zaum' (Za-um, literally”beyond the mind, or the “trans-rational). In that spirit, I'd like to offer you these three very short Kharms poems so close in spirit to Khlebnikov's own miniatures, I believe them to have been intended as homages. Of the section of roughly 50 poems that close the book, many, perhaps most of the others are likewise "in this spirit,” and Daniil Kharms, at least in his poetry, remained a “Khlebnikovian” and a “Budetlyanen” (Khlebnikov's “person of the future”) to the end of his life. The Russian Futurian strategy of epatage, or “shocking the bourgeoisie,” was also at the heart of his personal style: in his dress, his dandyism, and particularly in his early, performative, improvisational, expressionistic theatrical work. (The accompanying photo is Daniil Kharms dressed as one of his personas, his "imaginary older brother".)

CHORUS

A cuckoo sleeps in a treeA lobster dreams under a rockIn the field lies a shepherdessAnd the wind is a two-way street.

[1935]

In every church bell there is spiteIn every red ribbon there is fireIn every young woman shiveringIn every young man his own steed

[1936]

I was watching a slowly eyelidthat was being lazily liftedand with its lazy glancecircling the affectionate rivers.

[after August 13, 1937]

∞

ON UNIVERSAL BALANCE

Everyone knows these days how dangerous it is to swallow stones.

One of my acquaintances even coined an expression for it: “Waisty,” which stands for: “Warning: Stone Inside”. And a good thing too he did that. “Waisty” is easy to remember, and, as soon as it comes up, or you need it for something, you can immediately recall it.

Аnd this friend of mine worked as a fireman, that is, as an engine stoker on a locomotive. First he rode the northern lines, then he served on the Moscow route. And his name was Nikolay Ivanovich Serpukhov, and he smoked his own hand-rolled cigarettes, Rocket brand, 35 kopeks a box, and he’d always say he doesn’t suffer from coughing as bad from them, and the five-ruble ones, he says, they make him gag.

And so, it once happened that Nikolay Ivanovich found himself in Hotel Europe, in their restaurant. Nikolay Ivanovich sits at his table, and the table over from him is occupied by some foreigners, and they’re gobbling up apples.

And that’s when Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself: “A curious thing,” Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself, “What an enigma the human being is.”

And as soon as he had said this to himself, out of nowhere, before him appears a fairy and says:

“What is it Good Sir that you desire?”

Well, of course, there’s a commotion at the restaurant, like, where did this little damsel suddenly appear from? The foreigners had even stopped stuffing themselves with apples. Nikolai Ivanovich himself caught a good scare and he says, just for the sake of it, to get rid of her:

“Please, forgive me,” he says, “But there is nothing in particular that I need.”

“You don’t understand,” the mysterious damsel says, “I’m what you call a fairy,” she says. “In a single blink of an eye, I can make for you anything you wish. You just give me the word, and I’ll make it happen.”

That’s when Nikolay Ivanovich notices that some sort of a citizen in a gray suit is attentively listening in on their conversation. The maître d’ comes running in through the open doors and behind him, some other character, with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.

“What the heck!” Nikolay Ivanovich thinks to himself, “Who the hell knows how this thing will turn out.”

And indeed, no one can understand what is going on. The maître d’ is hopping across the tops, from one table over to another, the foreigners are rolling up all the carpets, and in general, who the hell can tell what’s really going on! Who is capable of what, that is!

Nikolay Ivanovich ran out into the street, forgetting even the hat he’d left behind earlier at the coat check, and he ran out onto LaSalle Street and said to himself: “Waisty! Warning: Stone Inside!” And also: “What haven’t I seen already in this whole wide world!”

And, having returned home, Nikolay Ivanovich said this to his wife:

“Do not be afraid, Ekaterina Petrovna, and do not worry. Only there isn’t any equilibrium in this life. And the mistake is only off by some kilogram and half for the entire universe, but still, it’s amazing, Ekaterina Petrovna, it is simply remarkable!”

THAT’S ALL.

[September 18, 1934]

Previously published in B O D Y.

∞

Daniil Kharms was the pen name of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (1905–1942). With his friend, the poet Alexander Vvedensky, Kharms cofounded the OBERIU, a group of second-generation Russian Futurist or so-called Absurdist writers active in the 1920s and 1930s. Not permitted to publish his mature work in Stalinist Russia, he survived, for a time, by composing poems for children. At the beginning of World War II, he was arrested (a second time) on the absurd charge of espionage and, feigning insanity to avoid summary execution, starved to death in a psychiatric hospital during the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Most of his writings survived only in notebooks, rescued fortuitously from a burned-out building by a friend and fellow OBERIU member, the philosopher Yakov Druskin. His short sketches, illegally circulated in Russia after the war, influenced several generations of underground writers who broke into the mainstream with the fall of the Soviet Union.

“Kharms’s obliquely allegorical dark comedies are both mystical and mythic, Daoist and Dadaist, daring and deranging, surrealist and satiric, metaphysical and metafictional. Charting the experience of everyday life in Russia in the 1920s and ’30s, Kharms is an (anti-)Soviet realist. In a world gone mad, Kharms is, ironically, a last refuge of sanity. Alex Cigale’s sparkling translations bring these works into a new life in English.” – Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at U. Penn and author of A Poetics, Girly Man, and Pitch of Poetry

"Absurdism — the ridiculous as a reaction and an alternative to revulsion and resignation before an absurd age." – Alex Cigale, 2015 NEA Fellow in Literary Translation, from the Introduction

∞

N.B. An update: After 22 years at the helm, this past year, founding editor Dan Veach passed the reins of the Atlanta Review, to its new editor, Karen Head, and the magazine is now newly affiliated with Georgia Tech University. In the coming year, I will be editing a Baltic Poetry issue of the magazine (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,) and hope to officially announce it in these pages by the end of this week.

January 20, 2017

In January of 1974, a five-pound bag of sugar cost 85 cents; by year-end, just in time for the office cookie exchange, the price of the same five-pound bag increased to $2.35. The trend was driven by a complicated combination of geopolitical events, including bad weather that wiped out crops, changes in domestic subsidies, import quotas and tariffs, along with a growing national sweet tooth.

I was aware of the price-hike and the reasons behind it not because I was a preternaturally astute observer of market forces but because I worked after school and on weekends as a cashier for Shop-Rite supermarket in our largely working-class neighborhood. Where there had once been rows of yellow and white Domino sugar bags, shelves were empty. Cereal, candy, bottled juice, cakes and cookies, baking mixes, even TV dinners with their gelatinous desserts, were now out of reach for many customers. With soaring prices, the market behaved as if there were a shortage. Management cut back on inventory and over the course of the year customers who would typically buy one bag of sugar every couple of weeks hoarded it whenever word circulated that another price increase was on the horizon. For a short time, my store rationed sugar at one 5-pound bag per customer. Some families gamed the system by having each spouse and child march through the checkout line alone with a single bag.

For some of us, myself included, it was the best thing that could have happened. At the time, I took my coffee with three teaspoons of sugar and drank a lot of soda. During weekend lunch breaks, a friend and I would share a smoke and to satisfy the inevitable hunger attack that followed would devour a bag of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies. There was no combination of sugar and fat that I would turn down.

My consumption of all things sugary had to stop. Over time I weaned myself of sugary drinks and sweetened coffee. It helped that nutritionists were finding an audience for their claims that sugar was detrimental to one’s health. They encouraged consumers to find alternatives, like fresh fruit for dessert and fruit juices or plain water instead of soda. Newspapers and magazines published recipes for sugar-free desserts. The sugar crisis of the ‘70s marked the beginning of my interest in healthy eating.

Alas, in the forty-plus intervening years, sugar and its evil sibling high-fructose corn syrup, continue to be a mainstay of the American diet. You find it in the obvious places but also hidden in processed foods like bottled salad dressings, canned soups, hot dogs, bread, and even in nut butters. While sugar alone has been cited as the cause of obesity and the associated illnesses (heart-disease, diabetes, and certain cancers), Gary Taubes, (The Case Against Sugar Knopf, December 2016) writes in the Wall Street Journal that “the evidence for the hypothesized chain of cause and unfortunate effects—eat sugar, become insulin-resistant, fatter and diabetic and then die prematurely—is ambiguous. It will probably stay that way. The National Institutes of Health have never seen the need for the expensive clinical trials that would be needed for a rigorous study of the issue.”

We do know with certainty that those whose eat a lot of processed foods are not as healthy as those who don’t and processed foods are where sugar lurks (along with other dubious ingredients). The good news is that the Food and Drug Administration recently approved a change in nutrition labels that will require manufacturers to list how many grams of sugar have been added to a product and what percentage of the recommended daily maximum that represents. Curious minds want to know, everyone else should know.

Carolina Ebeid is a the author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior (Noemi Press, Fall 2016). She is a student in the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Denver, and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. She has won fellowships and prizes from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Stadler Center for Poetry, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work appears widely in journals such as The Kenyon Review,Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, and more recent work appears in Linebreak, Bennington Review,jubilat, and in the inaugural Ruth Stone House Reader. "Homotextuality" first appeared in The Acentos Review.

November 20, 2016

On May 2, 2013, CNN proleptically ran a news segment in which Henry Kissinger advised Hillary Clinton on the life she may expect to lead after serving as secretary of state. It is an amusing piece not only because of the jokes he and she made but also because of a book published almost secretly in 1974 entitled President Kissinger, a satirical piece of political fiction that I found riveting atthe time. Somehow the poet Andrei Codrescu got hold of some advance copies of the book, in mass-market paperback form, and he gave me two of them.

As I recall the plot, a constutional amendment makes it possible for Kissinger -- born in Germany and therefore ineligible to become president -- to overcome the rule that eliminating foreign-born citiens fom pursung the White House. Teddy Kennedy is Kissinger's vice-president, in charge of domestic affairs, and Kissinger ends up as President of the World, certified as such by the UN General Assembly. The writing of the book is quite ordinary and it depends for its effects entirely on a scenaro that seemed far-fetched but oddly in line with where the nation was in August 1974, the month Richard Nixon resigned as president. I pitched a piece on the book and even interviewed its publisher, Maurice Girodias, but New York magazine, which wanted me to write for them, nixed the idea because of Girodias's chequered career as a sensationalist. It is a pity because as a publishing stunt -- though by no neas as an artistic achievement and as a vision of political paranoia President Kissinger was effective in the way of Oliver Stones's brilliant Oliver Stones's JFK, though nowhere near the artisic success that Stone achieved in the film. -- DL

<<< Washington (CNN) – Former Secy. of State Henry Kissinger gave a very public nod Wednesday night to a 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign – saying that secretaries of state have a good track record of moving into the highest office in the land.

“At least four secretaries of state became president,” the foreign-born Kissinger joked during remarks at the annual Atlantic Council awards dinner in Washington. “And that sort of started focusing my mind even though there was a constitutional provision that prevented me from doing it. I thought up all kinds of schemes to get around that.”Then, adopting a more serious tone, he continued. “I want to tell Hillary that when she misses the office, when she looks at the histories of secretaries of state, there might be hope for a fulfilling life afterwards.”

Kissinger, himself a former secretary of state, was presenting Clinton with a Distinguished Leadership Award.